Thursday, March 29

Monday, March 19

I'm really missing China today! We use to have a really cool sliding window door that took up a wall in the living room as well as one of our bedrooms. It totally reminds me of the first picture. Of course on a college student budget it wasn't as nice. I'll have to post some picture of our apartment in Beijing. It had some serious potential.

There
is an old woman who lives in a hidden place that everyone knows in
their souls but few have ever seen. As in the fairy tales of Eastern
Europe, she seems to wait for lost or wandering people and seekers to
come to her place.

She
is circumspect, often hairy, always fat, and especially wishes to evade
most company. She is both a crower and a cackler, generally having more
animals sounds than human ones.

I
might say she lives among the rotten granite slopes in Tarahumara
Indian territory. Or that she is buried outside Phoenix near a well.
Perhaps she will be seen traveling south to Monte Alban in a burnt-out
car with the back window shot out. Or maybe she will be spotted standing
buy the highway near El Paso, or riding shotgun with truckers to
Morelia, Mexico, or walking to market above Oaxaca with strangely formed
boughs of firewood on her back. She calls herself names: La Huesera,
Bone Woman, La Trapera, The Gather, and La Loba, Wolf Woman.

The
sole work of La Lobas is the collecting of bones. She collects and
preserves especially that which is in danger of being lost to the world.
Her cave is filled with the bones of all manner of desert creatures:
the deer, the rattlesnake, the crow. But her speciality is wolves.

She
creeps and crawls and sifts through the montanas, mountains, and
arroyos, dry riverbeds, looking for wolf bones and when she has
assembled an entire skeleton, when the last bone is in place and the
beautiful white sculpture of the creature is laid out before her, she
sits by the fire and thinks about what song she will sing.

And
when she is sure, she stands over the criatura, raises her arms over it
and signs out. That is when the rib bones and leg bones of the wolf
begin to flesh out and the creature becomes furred. La Loba sings some
more, and more of the creature comes into being; it tail curls upward,
shaggy and strong.

And La Loba sings more an the wolf creature begins to breathe. And
still La Loba sings so deeply that the floor of the desert shakes, and
as she sings, the wolf opens its eyes , leaps up, and runs away down
the canyon. Somewhere
in its running, whether by the speed of its running, or by splashing
its way into a river, or by way of a ray of sunlight or moonlight
hitting it right in the side, the wolf is suddenly transformed into a
laughing woman who runs free toward the horizon.

So
remember, if you wander the desert, and it is near sundown, and you are
perhaps a little bit lost, and certainly tired, that you are lucky, for
La Loba may take a liking to you and show you something– something of
the soul.